


Third Eye Blind

by DevinePhoenix



Category: Bleach
Genre: Gen, Partial Blindness, no beta we die like men
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-22
Updated: 2019-12-22
Packaged: 2021-02-26 02:49:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,489
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21906262
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DevinePhoenix/pseuds/DevinePhoenix
Summary: URAICHI PC#4 - SilenceLong before Kisuke was blinded by Askin, his eyes had already been damaged.
Comments: 8
Kudos: 132
Collections: UraIchi Prompt Challenge #4





	Third Eye Blind

**Author's Note:**

> For some strange reason, my brain went: "ooooh Silence! you know what I should do? Make Kisuke blind"   
> Just based on the terrifying thought I had, If you can't see and all you have to go on is sound, but there's no sound, wouldn't that be the most terrifying Silence of all? 
> 
> tbh it didn't really turn out like that. ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯ Enjoy!

Askin was not the first time Kisuke has had to reconstruct his eyes. It wasn’t even the fifth.

Urahara Kisuke had spent many long years with a successful assassination career. If things went well, no one would see him coming and he’d be in and out with little struggle. Ideal conditions almost never happened though. There were struggles, against the guards, against the target, against witnesses. As with any combat, fierce and desperate in the dark, he couldn’t be lucky all the time. All the skill in the world could sometimes still lose to sheer luck.

The first time it happened, a target got in a lucky blow. A smash of glass across his face as his blade struck home. The victim dies in a gush of blood and satisfaction of injuring their killer. He yelps once as he rocks back with the force of the blow before he stifles his pain and the noise. It is a well beaten in instinct by his trainers. Assassins were not allowed to make noise. His hands automatically go to his eyes in his panic, but he stops the reflex before he can ground more glass into his wounds.

He descends into panic with the pain. With his major sense down, how is he going to escape? If it is permeant, then how can he continue to be a good Omni assassin? If he isn’t Omni then he has no worth to the Shihoins. And with his skill and knowledge, he wouldn’t even have the mercy of being thrown back to the dusty forgotten streets of the Rukongai. No, it would either be the Maggot’s Nest or quick execution for him.

His ears strain to try and pick up any sounds that anyone noticed the assassination. All he hears is silence, his entire world shrouded in darkness and uncertainty with no input from the outside world.

Even as a young assassin, he knows first aid. He picks out the glass as best as he can. It takes longer than he thought it would, but eventually he is ready to try the healing technique he saw Unohana-taicho use once.

(He really should not have seen her at all. Onmi were only permitted to receive healing from onmi healers to safeguard their identity. But he had the privilege to be patrolling when Unohana-taicho was healing a scuffle of Eleventh Squad Shinigami.)

Thankfully, it works. He leaves that assassination silently through the window and no one knows he was ever there. Ultimately, the healing is patchwork at best. He regains his sight but his eyes were never sharp as they used to be, the price of his botched, novice healing. He still considers it a win, he can still see after all.

The second time, he is blinded it is actually his fault.

One of his experiments explodes in his face, sending the solution that burns like acid right into his retinas. (He really should’ve been wearing safety googles in hindsight) (In hindsight he doubts that it would’ve helped with how violent the explosion was)

The standard twelfth division alarms go off to alert the rest of the squad that an accident has occurred, all flashing red lights and obnoxious blaring klaxons. His new squad doesn’t like him much, but they’d at least come check on him after all that noise.

He doesn’t hear anything though because his entire world has gone white in agony. Every other sense has completely shut off except for that of pain. He was probably screaming but he would never know. His reiatsu surges, wild and frantic. It reacts on instinct, following the actions it took the last time this happened and surges to his eyes. It forces his eyes to regenerate, a feeling that makes him want to claw out his own eyes.

But there is still acid in his eyes.

He regenerates and he burns, and he regenerates, and he burns. A vicious cycle that steals his breath with the pain. At a moment where it burns less, he fights through the pain to direct the regeneration enough to push _out_ the substance instead of forcing it deeper.

It is a rush job, but he stops it from getting worse.

In the end, he is carted off to the Fourth Division because he was screaming a whole lot and the entire Twelfth division noticed. (He makes a note to soundproof the lab when he recovers)

Unohana fixes the rest of his face but looks impressed with the state of his eyes. Namely the fact that he still has them when the rest of his face is a mess. The wounds are fresh enough that the acid burns heal without so much as a scar under her expert touch. Even with her skill, there is little she can do about his eyes.

She may be the best healer in Soul Society but even she cannot reverse the mess that is his eyes. The initial injury is too old and scarred, not to mention the fresh damage and botch healing on top of that. She can only shake her head and hand him a bottle of medicated eyedrops for his chronic pain and a general booklet for eye injuries. He’s only slightly ashamed to realize that he probably should have gone to her about his eyes the minute he left the Omni Corps.

The booklet is very helpful, detailing proper care for damaged eyes and what kind of techniques and habits will make it easier for him. He had been doing a lot of things wrong, but he had also managed to do some of the book’s techniques properly. He shamelessly takes advantage of the more advanced healing techniques the book describes and doesn’t realize until years later that such things would never have been in a general booklet. The medicated eyedrops quickly become a crutch that he indulged whenever he can hide away and apply them. Opening his eyes in the morning no longer feels like the sunlight is trying to gouge out his eyes.

His eyes don’t deteriorate to a worse state with the acid accident, they remain the same level of bad he’s long grown accustom to. The desperation of healing means that the job is once again rushed and scarred. However, his speedy reaction prevented the acid from damaging deeper parts of his eyes.

In between experiments, he trains. His eyesight is patchwork and held together by prayers, there’s no telling when it would dissolve and leave him in that pitch-black silent world. He blindfolds himself and teaches himself to live, to move, to fight without one of his essential senses. Thankfully, his reiatsu helps where his hearing cannot compensate.

(This does not help when Aizen gets him thrown in jail and his reiatsu is suppressed. He is blind again in the dark cell with eyesight that would not work, reiatsu that would not help and hearing that could only hear the cold echo of silence in the soundproofed cell)

Regeneration three through twelve are multiple techniques and attempts to improve or maintain the state of his eyes. There are no improvements, but he manages to stave off complete deterioration for years with the dogged determination of a man on his last straw.

In contrast for white-and-gray somber Soul Society, the human world is so **_bright_**.

He starts wearing a bucket hat to block out most of the light where possible. The shadows give his eyes a rest and stop direct sunlight from burning his scarred irises.

But for all that it is bright, it is also so much louder. He prefers the noise over the silence of Soul Society. When his eyes hurt, he can trust himself to wander down a street with his eyes closed. His ears can easily track chattering people and noisy cars and the flow of loud, loud life around him. It is overwhelming at first, all the noise, but when he leans to categorize them, they become almost comforting. He can tell what goes on around him without hurting his eyes or expending reiatsu for the first time since that bottle smashed into his eyes.

He prefers not to tell anyone about the problem with his eyes. It invites so many awkward questions and he would rather not explain. But he doesn’t have to say anything for his best friends to accommodate him. Tenkai keeps the lights in the shop at a level that won’t irritate his eyes. He casually installs a bell on the shop door and adds a handy gravel walkway to alert Kisuke of any customers. There are suddenly little noisemaking objects rigged up where Kisuke would find most useful. Glass chimes on windows and floors that creaked most impressively at the slightest movement. He makes the house liveable to his paranoid instincts. At his worst moments, he can track everything going on in the house from nothing but the sounds each of the doors and floorboards make. It soothes him enough that he can sleep.

Yoruichi always makes sure to make some noise to announce herself when she enters a room. A rarity for someone who usual enjoyed surprising the unwary. He could hear her where his eyes could no longer pick out her almost invisible figure. It was polite of her, because to all his other senses, reiatsu included, she was undetectable. Part of him mourns for the days of their childhood when they would make a game of stealth surprising one another. He had been quite good at spotting her. Those days are over though. And though they never talked about it, after the first time he startled badly when he normally would’ve seen her, she knew something was wrong. Sometimes he really loves his friends. Without saying a single word to them, they figured out something was wrong with him and adjusted.

Benihime helps in her own way. She swallows her pride and lets herself be sealed into the form of a walking stick. The new form is a perfect fit for the Living World, where carrying a sword in public was against the law. This way, he is never unarmed, and he can use her to help him see in emergencies.

For all that Ichigo is sharp at noticing things, it takes him a while to realize that his teacher was partially blind. To be fair, their initial meeting was full of stress of the near-death and frantic training. Ichigo just dismisses Kisuke’s unnaturally sharp awareness as the instincts of a veteran fighter.

It is only later, where he sees the man walking casually in the street that he realizes that there may be something wrong at all. Kisuke walks with his hat pulled low against the bright of the midday sun, his head cocked in a listening position and his sheathed swordstick tapping almost idly on the ground in front of him. It takes him a moment to realize that, under the hat, the man’s eyes are closed and relaxed.

Before Ichigo can stop himself, he’s crossed the street and sidled up to the shopkeeper’s elbow. He doesn’t even need to announce himself before Kisuke greets him. He’s less rambunctious than usual, but the man’s tricky little smile is on his face nonetheless, waiting for Ichigo’s reaction.

He _is_ surprised of course, Kisuke was such a deadly combatant that he could hardly imagine that he couldn’t see. With such grace and supernatural awareness, it never even occurred to him. But the longer he thought about it, the more it made sense. The little habits, the little glass trinkets around the house, his ability to sense approaching people before they entered visible range, his wide gestures when speaking that made sure that he never had to look directly at a person.

Ichigo may not have known the man for long but even he knows at this point, to avoid Kisuke’s little games, one must not play. He studious avoids mentioning it at all and gently offers his elbow. Pouting a little at the lost tease and without an ounce of shame, Kisuke takes his arm and starts babbling about the next idea he had for Ichigo’s training. It sounds like it would be hellish but Ichigo does not mind.

The afternoon is relaxing. They chat and wander the streets and Ichigo ends up being a pack mule for the Shouten’s groceries while Kisuke cackles and takes shameless advantage of his presence.

When Askin blinds Kisuke, he almost laughs. On anyone else, that was a good strategy. Sight was one of the most important senses in combat. Removing it would leave even the most powerful fighter off balance and flailing. But he was Urahara Kisuke, a scientific genius and his eyes had never been good at all. For all the senses to target, sight was the wrong one to target when your opponent was him.

Benihime comes when he calls, in full Bankai and ready to shred. But before he can dissect his opponent into a mush of flesh, he reconstructs his eyes.

He knows the construction of his eyes far more than any other body part and the reconstruction and stitching comes far easier than ever before. Belatedly he realizes that he’s never attempted to fix his eyes with Benihime before. He rarely has cause to pull out his bankai and he usually avoids reconstructing anything with her. For all she loves him and his bloody ways, she is primarily a bankai meant to shred and he never wanted to insult her by presuming otherwise.

But now he can feel her sense of longsuffering exasperation as he blinks open his eyes and can _see_ better than he has since he was a boy. _She_ knows what his eyes should look like and she refuses to leave the atrocious scarring her person has been giving himself.

Of course, that aversion to scarring doesn’t apply to the scars she leaves on him.

He doesn’t mind of course, because scars matter little to him when they’re not in his eyes. He’d gladly pay in scars just for the ability to properly see again.

When he meets Ichigo again, after all is said and done, he can finally see his student’s face properly after all these years. It’s a bit of a shock, to see him in proper detail. His features had always been slightly blurry in his sight, bad eyesight and interactions that focused more on training and motion. His impression of his student was more felt through his reiatsu, overpowering and protective and warm, but now he had a face to link to the feeling.

Were his cheekbones always this sharp?

Did his eyes always glint that gorgeous hazy tawny tending towards gold?

Was his hair always that soft and fluffy and petable?

…..Is that what his smile looked like?

Kisuke made an undignified squeaking sound as his former student turned to him with a rare beaming smile, still high on victory and adrenaline.

**Author's Note:**

> Based on my own shitty blurred out eyesight, I have a tendency to identify people more by how they sound and move then their actual faces and there's always that little thrill when you put on glasses and can finally _see_.   
> Kisuke's damaged eyesight is basically, reaally, really shortsightedness. So....in conclusion, Kisuke could've probably been seeing for a few decades if this idiot invested in some glasses like the rest of us.


End file.
